I used to know the guys in this band called Translator. Their one KROQ hit was a tune called Everywhere That I’m Not, a kind of jetsetter anthem about missed connections.
One night in LA some of the Translator guys were heading out to hear a band called Echo and the Bunnymen and invited me to join them. I’d never heard of that band and for whatever reason I just couldn’t get past the name. I mean, come on. Echo? And the BUNNYMEN? Please. How could a band with a name like that could be any good?
(Feel free to snicker and mutter under your breath at this juncture. Believe me, not too long afterward I learned just how wrong I was.)
That same year my sister was traveling through Europe and went to see Echo and the Bunnymen in Amsterdam at this happening club called the Melkweg (Milkyway). (I think it’s pretty obvious from this story who the cooler sister was.)
I guess you might say that Echo and the Bunnymen were pretty much everywhere that I wasn’t.
The other day Think I Need It Too by E&TBM was streaming on DIM and it all came rushing back to me. Ian McCulloch’s vocals cut through time and space and echoed with that sharp poetry. You can’t always know where the good art is going to be, but missing Echo that night in LA because of my own closed-mindedness was a life and art lesson I’ve carried with me.
That Echo song got me remembering when I was living in San Francisco in a Victorian apartment in the Castro, a place that pretty much became Translator’s crash pad. I remember being with them when John Lennon was shot. Some of them had spent time in Japan in a Beatles tribute band and Steve Barton had played the Lennon character. It was uncanny and sad and Lennon had just put out Double Fantasy and happiness seemed only to be just beginning for him.
Steve and Larry and Dave and Bob went into the studio and played Lennon songs all night.
I think I’ll end this post with a few lyrics from Echo and The Bunnymen’s The Killing Moon:
In starlit nights I saw you
So cruelly you kissed me
Your lips a magic world
Your sky all hung with jewels
The killing moon will come too soon
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